Instagram has rolled out plenty of new tools over the years, allowing you to customize your feed and increase engagement. Stories, IGTV, and Reels should all have a spot in your Instagram workflow, but one of the easiest tools to use to increase engagement is the Instagram carousel feature. This article will cover everything you need to know about using a photo carousel to create more engaging content on Instagram.
An Instagram carousel is a series of images that are grouped together in a single post. These posts are useful for telling stories that might require more than one image. For example, you could create an Instagram carousel to show before/after shots of a DIY project, an outfit, or a room. You could post a recipe with process shots, or you could highlight different aspects of a recent vacation.
This is a complicated answer because we don’t know exactly how the Instagram algorithm works, and the engagement rate depends a lot on the size of your following, the content you post, and the genre you post about the most. According to Social Insider, photo carousel posts outperform video posts by a large margin, at almost 5.13% engagement for smaller accounts.
Instagram users often report that their carousel posts generate very little engagement from hashtags, making the rest of us ask whether hashtags even work on carousel posts. While we can’t speak for every Instagram user out there, we can confirm that even the most popular carousel posts on Instagram receive virtually zero engagement from hashtags. Does that mean that you should forgo using hashtags altogether? Definitely not. Hashtags will not harm your reach or your engagement, so keep using them for now.
You can definitely promote your Instagram carousel posts. But before you decide to spend money on Instagram, decide what your ultimate goal is. Do you want to increase your profile visits, website visits, or DMs? If you just want more overall engagement, you might be better off going the organic route. If you do decide to promote your Instagram carousel, here’s how to do it:
When it comes to creating an engaging Instagram carousel, the last thing you want to do is just choose a bunch of photos and call it a day. For the best results, you have to think about the story you’re trying to tell, how the photos go together, and your caption. Here are some tips for making a photo carousel that really stands out.
Instagram allows 2 to 10 individual photos or videos for each carousel post. Photos can be any size, but the resolution should be at least 1080 by 1080. Sizes for all photos must be the same, so if you choose a landscape photo for your first photo, all the rest must be cropped to landscape orientation. You can upload photos in either JPEG or PNG format as long as they are under 30 MB in size.
Videos can also be uploaded to an Instagram carousel post. They should be in the MP4 format with a maximum size of 4 GB. Carousel videos can’t be more than 60 seconds long.
Instagram carousel posts are so much easier to create than videos. Here’s our step-by-step guide to creating your first carousel post.
There are some situations where you may want to split a single panoramic image into multiple images so that your viewers can swipe through them in a carousel post. This type of post isn’t as simple as a regular carousel post, but it’s far easier to do if you have the Canva app on your phone. Here’s how to split a photo in three for a carousel post using Canva:
If you’ve already downloaded Canva to practice splitting photos for your carousel, you’ll be excited to learn that they also have some ready-to-go, easy-to-customize templates that you can use for your Instagram carousel posts. The easiest way to find them is to open Canva and use the search bar at the top to search for “Instagram carousel.” You will see a whole collection of templates that you can use to tell your story. Once you’ve chosen a template to use for your photo carousel, you can edit everything about it right in Canva. Choose new fonts, new photos, new colors — the options really are endless.
When you have finished designing your template in Canva, it will be saved in the My Designs section of the app. Now you can use it to create new Instagram carousel posts whenever you want.
Did you know you can schedule carousel posts on Instagram using Facebook’s Creator Studio? You can use Creator Studio on a computer to schedule carousel posts. There’s a mobile app too. But unfortunately, it can only be used to schedule posts to Facebook at present.
The biggest caveat to using Creator Studio is that you have to manage both a Facebook page and an Instagram business account. If you fit into this category, read on to learn how to schedule your first Instagram carousel:
Using Instagram carousel posts is an easy way to provide your followers with fresh content while increasing engagement on the platform. Once you start creating carousels, you’ll find that it isn’t much more difficult than creating a single post. And if you’re looking for other ways to feature multiple photos on your Instagram, try Instagram Guides — the latest trick on the platform.